Christian proposes: ... > [The last sentence is completely new: Currently, a few people don't have a > working forward file on master or don't check their mail box there.] > > Usually, a package has exactly _one_ maintainer. > > Only in rare situations, a package will be allowed to have several > maintainers. This is a special policy exception for a single package and > that exception has to be approved by a discussion on debian-devel. The > `Maintainer:' field of such a package would have to use the following > format:
You're being (a) unclear and (b) overly restrictive. You imply some kind of permission is required for having several maintainers for a single package. This is not / should not be the case. > `MN1, MN2, MN3, ... <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>' > > The maintainer MN1 is called `coordinator' of the package. (Note, that the > exact syntax with the commas `,' is important since such maintainer fields > need to be parsed by scripts.) This doesn't allow well for largeish groups. What if they want to put the group name in the `phrase' part of the email address ? Will it not cause confusion if different users of the address put in different comments ? I think you need an exception mechanism, for things that otherwise don't fit. Computer-based systems with no good manual override are often a bad thing. Furthermore, commas are no good because they're already a separator for separate addresses in a single field. (Admittedly we already allow a syntax like John F. Bloggs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> which is not permitted by RFC822.) I suggest that in cases where a package is maintained by several people the list of people _not_ necessarily be kept in the developer DB. If this causes some maintainers to appear not to be doing anything we can add them specially, or something. Ian.
